Names, brands, writing, and the language of commerce.

November 07, 2016

Tomorrow is Election Day in the United States, the culmination of an unprecedentedly nerve-combusting season of political warfare. It’s been a campaign for which derangement – a mental disturbance; a disruption of the regular order – would seem to have been invented. It would even seem to merit the coining of derangement syndrome: an extreme response, often untethered from empirical reality, to a particular candidate or elected official.

August 08, 2016

Goldwater Rule: An informal ethical code that prohibits psychiatrists from offering opinions about the mental state of someone they haven’t personally evaluated. The rule has been accepted by the American Psychiatric Association since 1973; officially, it is known as Section 7.3 of the APA’s ethics principles.

The rule is named after Barry Goldwater, the U.S. senator and 1964 Republican presidential candidate whose extreme (for the time) conservative views prompted a survey, published in Fact magazine, in which 12,356 psychiatrists were asked whether Goldwater was mentally fit to serve as president. Almost half of the respondents answered that Goldwater was unfit, “describing him as ‘unbalanced,’ ‘immature,’ ‘paranoid,’ ‘psychotic’ and ‘schizophrenic,’ and questioning his ‘manliness.’”

The rule has been in the news during the current election cycle because of widespread claims, from professionals and laypeople alike, that the Republican candidate, Donald Trump, is psychologically unstable.

September 15, 2014

Validate: To make legally valid; to sanction; to confirm or corroborate; to authorize; to verify. (“The court validated the contract”; “The judge validated the election”). From Latin validatus, participle form of validus: strong, powerful, effective. Related to valiant.

Those are the primary definitions of validate in all of the major dictionaries I consulted: American Heritage, OED, Merriam-Webster, and Macmillan. But validate has some specialized meanings, too, one of which baffled me recently.

This usage is common in the U.S. “Parking validation” refers to a stamp on a parking receipt that gives the bearer discounted or free access to a parking space. (This usage does mystify some people, mostly non-Americans: see anxious questions at WiseGeek, Yahoo Answers, and Trip Advisor.) Here, “validate” has the “sanction” meaning: a validation sticker or stamp confirms the bearer’s right to park in a private lot or garage. (I couldn’t determine when this usage first cropped up, or who the original parking-validator was. I’d love to know.)

And because I survived the Psychobabble Era, I know another usage of validate: “to cause a person to feel valued, significant, or worthwhile; to affirm that a person’s feelings, opinions, desires, etc. have validity, truth, or worth.” (Adapted from OED, whose earliest citation for this usage was published in a 1951 journal of child-development research.)

Validation, “a fable about the magic of free parking.” The short film was directed by Kurt Kuenne; the title plays on two meanings of “validate.” Watch here.

The validate usage that confused me came from a prospective client, a marketing person who works in technology. This person asked me to “validate” a product name the company already uses. I read the request in the legal sense: “Confirm our position; tell us we’re doing the correct thing.” And I was flummoxed, because I don’t see my role as that of a rubber-stamp.

But it turns out my client had a different definition mind. This validate means something closer to “Evaluate the correctness of the name.”

My realization came when, soon after I got the “validate” request, I happened to be chatting with an acquaintance who does data analysis for drug companies’ clinical trials. I asked her whether she’d ever used “validate” to mean anything other than “confirm,” and she, well, confirmed that she had. In drug testing, she said, “to validate” means “to demonstrate that a process maintains a desired level of compliance at all stages.” (I’ve subbed in the language of a Wikipedia entry to be sure I got it right.)

The “evaluate” sense of validate comes from software engineering (and from engineering generally). Here’s how a Wikipedia entry on validation and verification puts it:

Validation checks that the product design satisfies or fits the intended use (high-level checking), i.e., the software meets the user requirements. This is done through dynamic testing and other forms of review. … Software validation confirms that the product, as provided, will fulfill its intended use.

Software validation is one thing, but name validation? I’ve been doing naming development in many areas, including technology, for many years, but I’d never been asked to “validate” a name. It was as though I were encountering a new language; no wonder I felt at sea.

I’m a quick study when I need to learn about arcane subjects like cybersecurity, surgical stents, or field-programmable gate arrays. I like learning my clients’ specialized vocabulary. But when we’re discussing my specialty, I’d prefer that they drop the jargon. If my clients aren’t familiar with my own lingo (sound symbolism, naming brief, suggestive names), I’ll use common, non-shibboleth-y English in our discussions of branding. Otherwise we risk misunderstanding, as we did with validate.

What I experienced with validate was what, in a series of posts for Language Log, the linguist Geoffrey Pullum has called nerdview*. Here’s how Pullum defines nerdview inhis most recent post on the subject, published September 12:

Nerdview stems from a failure of something fundamentally human and highly relevant to linguistic communication: to do linguistic communication you have to appreciate that the other human has a viewpoint, a perspective, and it may not be the same as yours. You have to be able to think about things from their point of view.

In his new book on language and usage, The Sense of Style, cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker suggests that a lot of jargon-packed writing can be blamed on the Curse of Knowledge: “a difficulty in imagining what it is like for someone else not to know something that you know.” When you’ve learned something so well “that you forget that other people may not know it,” Pinker writes, “you also forget to check whether they know it.”

I’ll have more to say about The Sense of Style in a future post. Meanwhile, I’m just grateful I’ve learned to define validate in Nerd Dialect.

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* Some would argue that the more technically correct term would be geekview. That argument may itself be an example of nerdview.

September 06, 2013

Do some corporate or product names make you shudder and cringe? Are there names you find so annoying that you can’t bear even to utter them aloud?

I want to know about the names you hate, and why. Is it the sound of the word, its spelling, a personal association? Can a good product or stellar customer service overcome your aversion to a name?

For comparison, consider the related phenomenon of word aversion, the well-documented tendency of some people to detest certain words. (“Moist” is frequently cited.) Read Mark Liberman’s posts on Language Log (start here and follow the links) to learn more about word aversion.

Now leave a comment and tell us about the names that make you cringe.*

April 22, 2013

Zajonc effect: The tendency of people, after repeated exposure to an unfamiliar thing, to reverse their initial feelings of dislike or distaste and like the thing more over time. Also called the Mere Exposure effect or the Mere Zajonc effect.

In a seminal experiment, published in The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in 1968, he showed subjects a series of random shapes in rapid succession. The shapes appeared and disappeared so quickly that it was impossible to discern that some of them were actually repeated. Nevertheless, when subjects were later asked which shapes they found most pleasing, they reliably chose the ones to which they had been exposed the most often, though they had no conscious awareness of the fact.

Familiarity, in other words, breeds a kind of affection, Professor Zajonc found. Even before he defined and named it, the effect was dear to the hearts of advertisers and other shapers of culture.

The Zajonc effect has implications for branding and naming. Bruce Tait of the Minneapolis brand consultancy Tait Subler wrote about the connection in a 2012 blog post:

Let’s say you have five potential brand positioning strategies. In an effort to make the best decision, you quantitatively test the alternative strategies. People being people, they respond most negatively to the most unfamiliar — and differentiating — concept. They respond best to the strategy they’ve seen before. The one your competitor is using already. That’s the strategy you run with because it “won” in research… and another undifferentiated brand strategy is born.

Look around at famous marketing failures and they are often the ideas that tested the best. Some of the greatest successes tested terribly because they were different. It is a frustrating fact of marketing that the key ingredient to long-term brand success is differentiation but people are wired to respond negatively to a truly differentiating idea upon initial exposure.

May 16, 2011

Neurodiversity: “The whole of human mental or psychological neurological structures or behaviors, seen as not necessarily problematic, but as alternate, acceptable forms of human biology.” – Double-Tongued Dictionary

Neurodiversity was coined in the late 1990s by journalist Harvey Blume and autism advocate Judy Singer, possibly independently. In a short article published in the September 1998 issue of The Atlantic, Blume wrote: “Neurodiversity may be every bit as crucial for the human race as biodiversity is for life in general. Who can say what form of wiring will prove best at any given moment?” Singer, an Australian who is the self-described parent of an “aspie” (person with Aspberger’s syndrome), contributed a chapter (“Why Can’t You Be Normal for Once in Your Life?”) to a 1999 book, Disability Discourse, in which she wrote:

For me, the key significance of the “Autistic Spectrum” lies in its call for and anticipation of a politics of Neurological Diversity, or what I want to call “Neurodiversity.” The “Neurologically Different” represent a new addition to the familiar political categories of class/gender/race and will augment the insights of the social model of disability.

Growing interest in the autism spectrum has given rise to a spate of articles, blogs, and books about neurodiversity. In his 20101 book Neurodiversity, educational consultant Thomas Armstrong argues that:

[P]eople with mental health labels (including autism, ADHD, dyslexia, and other brain differences), are “differently wired” than so-called normal (or “neurotypical”) individuals, and that their differences should be accommodated by society rather than being regarded as a “disease” that must be cured.

Armstrong also calls neurodiversity “a civil rights movement proposing that individuals with mental health labels be protected against discrimination and prejudice in the same way that people of color, women, and other minorities are protected.”

One widespread misconception about the neurodiversity movement is that it is universally opposed to all treatments for medical problems associated with these conditions, such as the development of drugs for disabling anxiety or gastrointestinal issues. But the neurodiversity community is itself diverse. Most of the advocates I know are on the spectrum themselves, and emphasize the importance of taking a variety of approaches — including making changes to public policy and the accelerated development of assistive technology such as apps for the iPad — to improve the lives of people who think differently.

September 20, 2010

Dark patterns: User interfaces designed to trick people into doing things they wouldn’t otherwise do.

Harry Brignull, a user-experience (UX) consultant who has a PhD in cognitive science, coined dark patterns for a presentation he gave earlier this month at the UX Brighton Conference. Brignull explained the concept on his blog, 90 Percent of Everything:

Normally we think of bad design as consisting of laziness, mistakes, or school-boy errors. We refer to these sorts of design patterns as Antipatterns. However, there’s another kind of bad design pattern, one that’s been crafted with great attention to detail, and a solid understanding of human psychology, to trick users into do things they wouldn’t otherwise have done. This is the dark side of design, and since these kind of design patterns don’t have a name, I’m proposing we start calling them Dark Patterns.

Brignull’s examples include low-cost airlines that put insurance in your basket without asking; social-networking sites that “purposefully make it hard for you to shrink your social graph or move your content into private realms (I’m looking at you, Facebook)”; and systems that require you to log in “using a long-forgotten password” in order to unsubscribe.

Dark patterns are not the same as “outright scams,” Brignull writes. The latter are “clumsy and easy to identify.” Rather, dark patterns are “techniques used by above-board products and services that trick users into doing things.”

Brignull’s slide presentation for the UX conference can be viewed on his blog and also here. You can follow Brignull on Twitter at @harrybr.

In the three-dimensional world, slanty design—a term coined by British interactivity researcher Russell Beale—is somewhat analogous to dark patterns. Slanty design is “design that purposely reduces aspects of functionality or usability”; however, its objectives don’t necessarily include siphoning cash from the user. For example, a cone-shaped disposable cup that discourages the user from leaving it on a table is a slanty design that promotes a social good.

October 05, 2009

Subitize: To immediately apprehend, without counting, the number of items in a small sample. Pronounced with a short u;stress on the first syllable. From Latin subito, sudden.

<<< Do not attempt to subitize the candy corn.

Subitize was coined in 1949 by E. L. Kaufman, et al., in "The Discrimination of Visual Number," published in the American Journal of Psychology. Later research found that babies can subitize quantities up to three. Adults don't do significantly better: most can subitize only four or five items. Chimpanzees can subitize up to six.

March 23, 2009

Extimacy: The sharing of experiences or thoughts usually considered private. Coined to suggest an opposition to "intimacy."

Extimacy is the ambient mood of the website Vie de Merde("Shitty Life"), which has become the ninth-most-popular search on Google's French search engine. Vie de Merde started as a personal journal a couple of years ago by Maxime Valette, now 20; last year the most popular posts were published in book form.

A March 21 article about VDM in the online Wall Street Journal quotes Swiss psychologist and author Yves-Alexandre Thalmann, who says the site's popularity stems from people's desire for recognition:

"In the past, people used to keep this kind of story to just a small group of intimates," says Mr. Thalmann. "Now they want to share this with as many people as possible" in hopes of winning approval from someone. He calls the phenomenon "extimacy."

Thalmann didn't invent the term; it was coined the French psychiatrist Jacques Lacan (1901-1981), who called it extimité. For Lacan and his followers, extimacy expressed "the opposition between inside and outside, between container and contained." Lacan died before the birth of the World Wide Web, but seemed to anticipate it, at least according to one observer:

We could look at the interface of the Web and, moreover, Web 2.0 as a mode of exercising extimacy with other people. A social networking profile is created and within that profile is a blending of various symbols from film, TV, art, others’ photography and so on. Contacting others and “friending” others based on similar web-surfing habits expands one’s online self and entwines within one, the interests and symbolization of another person. Moreover, when looking at the interface of the computer screen, one experiences the decentering of one’s self-image, a fragmented mirroring back of oneself occurs. Desires that are posted by other people, become one’s own desires, desires that one did not even know existed. By expanding one’s network, one comes to see oneself as projected by these other people. Again, there is an intertwining, a conjoining of self and other and in this conjoining, an extimate self is realized.

The meaning of "extimacy" is, contradictorily, contained within the root of "intimate": the Latin intimare, which means "to make known, announce, impress."

The founders of Vie de Merde have also launched an American version of the site, F My Life ("Everyday Life Stories"). A similar concept underlies the longer-running Post Secret and the newer Twitter counterpart, Secret Tweet.

January 05, 2009

Liminal: Related to a threshold. Used especially in relation to a psychological state between existential planes (a liminal state between life and death). From Latin limin or limen, "threshold."

Liminal is also occasionally used in architecture to refer to a physical threshold. In physics, liminal refers to the least amount (of energy, for example) required to produce an effect.

A legal term, in limine, is linguistically related. A motion in limine ("at the threshold") is a request submitted to the court in an attempt to exclude evidence during trial, usually to shield the jury from possibly prejudicial evidence.

Hat tip to trademark lawyer Ron Coleman, who casually dropped in limine into a tweet and sent me to The Google.

UPDATE: I wrote this post over the weekend. This morning my A Word a Day subscription brought me--yep, you guessed it, "liminal." Coincidence? Maybe we're all feeling as though we're on the threshold of something.